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CBS News--Colorado school district votes to let teachers carry guns
DENVER -- A rural Colorado school district decided to allow its teachers and other school staff members to carry guns on campus to protect students.
The Hanover School District 28 board voted 3-2 Wednesday night to allow school employees to volunteer to be armed on the job after undergoing training.
The district’s two schools serve about 270 students about 30 miles southeast of Colorado Springs, and it takes law enforcement an average of 20 minutes to get there. The district currently shares an armed school resource officer with four other school districts.
Board member Michael Lawson backed the idea not only as way to protect students from a mass shooting, but also as protection against possible violence connected with nearby marijuana grows, which he believes are connected with foreign cartels, the Gazette of Colorado Springs reported.
He said it will take months to work out the details and to train employees.
School board President Mark McPherson said a survey showed the community was split on the issue. While staffers would get some training, the retired Army officer said he didn’t think it would be enough to help them respond effectively to an active shooter. He worries what would happen if they fired and missed in a classroom.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/colorado-school-district-votes-to-let-teachers-carry-guns/
CBS News (The Associated Press contributed to this report)| December 15, 2016
Washington Post (via Chicago Tribune)--A Nobel Prize winner says public preschool programs should start at birth
Nobel Prize winner James Heckman's research has played an important role in establishing that high-quality public preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds can more than pay for itself over the long term, as low-income children who attend are more likely to live productive lives. It's an economic argument that has persuaded lawmakers from both parties to support early education initiatives.
Now Heckman has released new research showing that the return on investment is even higher for high-quality programs that care for low-income children from infancy to age 5. Children in such zero-to-five programs are more likely to graduate from high school, less likely to be incarcerated than their counterparts who stayed home or enrolled in low-quality programs, had higher IQs and were healthier during the course of their lives, according to the study released Monday.
All of that taken together leads to a significant savings to society, the study found.
The rate of return on the public investment in zero-to-five programs is 13 percent per year, Heckman and his colleagues estimate, up from an estimate of 7 percent to 10 percent per year for preschool programs that start at age 3.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-public-preschool-start-birth-20161212-story.html
Emma BrownThe Washington Post
Education Week--RTI Expands, Encounters Growing Pains
Response to intervention has come a long way from its origins in special education law— but not without some bumps
In 2004, the reauthorized Individuals with Disabilities Education Act first introduced into federal policy the concept of "response to intervention."
Now, 12 years later, the educational framework has continued to expand its reach—while also experiencing some growing pains.
The IDEA mentions response to intervention only as a method for identifying children with learning disabilities. But RTI was quickly adopted as a model for overall school improvement, because of its focus on providing assistance quickly to struggling students, before any academic deficits have a chance to become entrenched.
Common features of a response-to-intervention model include: universal screening tools that allow teachers to accurately determine which students need extra help; evidence-based interventions intended to get those students back on track; multiple "tiers" of intensity, so that students who need more help get a higher degree of intervention; and progress monitoring, so that educators have the data on how well a student is responding to the extra help and can make changes if needed.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/12/14/rti-expands-encounters-growing-pains.html
Christina A. Samuels |December 13, 2016
